by Ajay Close
‘How’re the legs?’
Poor old Hilly, never the same after that hit-and-run driver. Give Dodo a symptom and she’ll be off, airing her knowledge of tibias and fibulas because she’s a medical professional, not a failed painter living on Mama’s legacy, and so Hilda has to answer ‘Right as ninepence,’ when in truth her knee is killing her.
Odd, the way she can feel so overshadowed and still bask in Dodo’s reflected glory. It doesn’t hurt a girl’s cachet, having a sister who has met a witch doctor and delivered black babies in mud huts. Does Dodo ever boast about her little sis the bohemian, palling around with spies and deviants? What Hilda wouldn’t give to find out.
Watching her kick drunkenly at the wheel that makes the Rayburn hotter, she feels a sudden stab of affection. How marvellous it was when Dodo left the prison of her first marriage and they were the Atkins girls again, gadding about London, working up a glow on the Kit-Cat dance floor, vying for the affection of Billy Bellairs. What larks! Then Dodo hooked it. Toronto first, then Cairo, Damascus, Borsad, Accra, anywhere but home. Fourteen long years. Hilda missed her so dreadfully that, in the seventeen years she has been back and living seventy miles away, they’ve hardly met. Why should she have it all her own way, taking off to the ends of the earth and then, just when it suits her, coming home to the welcoming arms of her kin? But who suffers most from Hilda’s sulk? Not Dodo. She has her shovel-handed husband, her bookish Oxford professor down the lane, all the friends and neighbours who drop by to drink her gin, and her career (so indispensable she’s still seeing patients at seventy). While Hilda has – what? A tenancy in Phene Street and the crowd in the pub across the road. The odd port and lemon in the Gateways, eavesdropping on the latest slang. Bugger, it’s good to see Dodo again. But even now, alone together in the warm kitchen, both of them woozy with drink, Hilda can’t seem to break through. So many things they could laugh over, so much to say, yet here they are, their small talk petering into silence.
If only Dodo would ask how she is. Not her legs, herself. Is she happy with her lot, is she afraid of dying alone, is she still carrying a torch for Billy Bellairs? How many people in her life has she truly loved? Hilda would like to ask these questions of Dodo too.
‘Billy’s on good form,’ Dodo says. Bloody Pollyanna.
‘Tonight.’
‘Not generally?’
Hilda pulls a face.
Dodo sighs, ‘It’s so sad.’
‘It’s always sad. You don’t get life without death. I would have thought you’d know that, Doctor Coubrough. I met a woman over there who’s been widowed twenty-five years. Longer than she was married. She’s made a go of it—’
Dodo retrieves the apple pie from the oven.
‘—interesting woman. About your age. Travelled around. France during the war, South Africa, Oz. A Scot.’
‘Oh yes?’ Dodo pours the top of the milk into a jug.
‘In fact, she had a connection with Perth.’
Moving towards the dining room, Dodo says over her shoulder, ‘Be a darling and bring the cream.’
Hilda had her own brush with the body politic. Stumbling down the hall half-asleep to find a gaberdine mac at the door: was she aware that Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had flown the coop? Had she helped them? At the time it seemed rather a hoot, being knocked up by MI5 in the middle of the night. She dined out on the story for weeks. But the joke wore thin. Her telephone emitted peculiar whirrings and clickings. Her god-daughter was turned down by the civil service, despite a first in Greats. The off-licence stopped giving her tick. One or two of her more conventional friends simply dropped her.
She learned it pays to be cagey. And yet, settled in a quiet corner of a Sydney tea shop, she found herself spilling the whole story to that graceful stranger with the faint Scots burr. She too had had a police tail, before the Great War. Then she went to gaol. She opened her lovely mouth and showed Hilda her ruined teeth. All that sacrifice, and by the time the government caved in she was living on another continent. She’d had her fill of Britain. Too many bitter memories.
‘He was my brother-in-law.’
A long silence. Was she going to get up and walk out?
‘Biggest mistake of my sister’s life,’ Hilda added, lest there was any ambiguity.
Arabella Colville-Reeves regarded her across the Victoria sponge. ‘I wondered if he was altogether sane,’ she said at last.
It’s late but the coals are still glowing in the grate. Beefy has gone up to bed, completely blotto. The grandfather clock lulls them with its ponderous tick. The bulldog snores on the sheepskin rug. Dodo, Hilda and Billy carry their brandy balloons to the hearthside chairs.
‘I’ve been thinking I might go back to calling myself Argemone.’
Hilda doesn’t know why this should be so killing, but even Dodo is amused. They talk about Gordon and Gyp and their kids, and Billy’s nephews, and Dodo says ‘It’s funny none of us had children of our own’. Not so very funny, Hilda drawls, with two of us lesbian and the other one not sure. Anyway, there’s a lot of barren stock about. This woman in Sydney, too. After a moment’s hesitation, Billy says, ‘You mean the one who knew Hugh Ferguson Whatsit?’ Yes, Hilda says, that one.
Dodo puts down her brandy glass. Hilda wonders if she twigged earlier, in the kitchen. She certainly knows now. There’s a green flicker in her eyes that takes Hilda back to when Billy switched allegiance. She is feeling usurped: she should have been the one to bump into Arabella Colville-Reeves. She can still write to her, of course, but Hilda would bet her boots she won’t get a reply.
‘Is she very like me?’ Dodo asks.
‘Maybe once. Not now.’
‘So she’s . . .?’
‘Strong.’
‘I’m strong.’
‘Intelligent.’
‘And I’m not?’
‘You married him.’
‘Did he ask her?’
Billy says ‘Come on, Do: ancient history.’
But she won’t be put off. ‘Did he?’
‘He tried to get her to go to Canada.’
‘Where he sent me,’ Dodo says in a small voice.
‘But with her, the idea was he’d come too.’
‘Hildegarde,’ Billy says warningly.
‘All he had to do was ask me to stay. It was ridiculous, taking off because of someone he knew before he met me. If he’d said one word to stop me—’
Billy looks at Hilda.
‘—Did she see him again, after they let her out of prison?’
Hilda didn’t ask. She could bluff it, of course, but what would be the right answer from Dodo’s point of view? Perhaps she would rather her sanctimonious first husband had been a secret rake.
‘Someone sent her a picture of him cut out of the newspaper.’
Dodo jumps on this, ‘And?’
‘He’d got fat.’
‘But did she love him?’
‘Steady on, Do.’ Billy gives Hilda another meaningful look.
‘If she did,’ Hilda says, ‘she didn’t tell me.’
They stare into the fire. Hilda feels like an actress who has fluffed her big scene. A chance in a million, and what did she learn from it? Just one thing: even as an old lady, Arabella has more sex appeal than Dodo.
‘He wrote to congratulate her when they gave women the vote. She was long gone. Her sister came across the letter in a drawer, took it over when she visited Oz. This was about ten years ago, too late to write back—’
Dodo looks up.
‘—he was dead by then.’
Dodo’s mouth frames a word, but no sound comes out.
Hilda drains her glass. ‘Just after the war, she said.’
TWENTY-NINE
Four months since I’d left the Gold Coast and still I woke every morning feeling cold, missing my old breakfast of paw paw with lime juice, fruit bats hanging in the trees above me, women cooking fufu on the street below. Charcoal smoke and orange blossom and the oddly comforting stench o
f drains.
Glasgow smelled of damp. It rained all day every day, as it must have when I studied medicine there, though my memories were all sunlit and laughter-filled. We laughed in 1943, too, but my shoes still let in water. Why had we come back? To make an honest woman of you, old girl. I could see Sheila and her friends thinking ‘you can’t marry him’ the first time they met Beefy, but they warmed to his jokes and nicknames and booming voice. Warmed to his warmth.
You would have thought Scottish hospitals would be clamouring to employ someone with my experience. Evidently curing the natives didn’t count. With nothing else to do, Beefy and I spent every minute in each other’s company. We had a ball, despite the powdered egg, and the mouse droppings, and the stony looks each time I walked into a bar (too old to be a tart, so what was I doing there?). Despite the dean at the Episcopal cathedral who found out I wasn’t yet divorced and wouldn’t marry us, no matter who my uncle had been.
Anyway.
We were lucky to find those digs. The tenement was on a corner, with a broad potato bed between us and the other side of the road, so we didn’t look directly into the building opposite. The ceilings were high, our fellow boarders friendly, our landlady took the brass ring on my finger at face value. As far as she was concerned I was already Mrs Coubrough. And Sheila was just up the road in Marchmont Terrace with her ruthless mouser and her black-market coal and a cook who worked wonders with the ration.
As soon as we were married, Beefy and I planned to get out of Glasgow. I was applying for jobs in England, as far south as we could get, as close to Europe and temperate winters and summer heat. We had love, and his pension to tide us over, we’d be all right. But first, I had to get a divorce.
I never thought he’d want to see me.
Beefy was determined to come too. If I wouldn’t let him meet the blighter, then he’d wait in a bar and escort me back to Glasgow. It took the best part of a day to dissuade him. And now I was shivering at Waverley Station in my pre-war musquash, with every other woman on the platform bare-legged or in uniform, and every other poster asking Is Your Journey Really Necessary?
Tommies loitered by the newsagent’s counter, each one burdened with an enormous kit bag and strap-on hessian packs fore and aft. I felt tired just looking at them, but they were lively enough to whistle at those WAAFs running to catch the Kirkcaldy train. Sex was everywhere in those days. Couples kissing in broad daylight. Gasps and moans in the blackout: so many girls with their pants round their ankles and their backs to the wall. I always hoped the man was a Yank. They said the Army gave them rubber johnnies.
Turning my head, I scanned the crowd. A surge of adrenaline sharpened my eyesight. Over there. Brown homburg, tweed overcoat, that hawk’s gaze. I hadn’t expected to feel like this. So desperate to get away.
He stopped a few feet off. A porter walked between us. The hiss of an engine about to depart. A platform announcement, the Inverness train was late.
It had been sixteen years.
‘Hugh,’ I said.
He stepped forward.
A moment of confusion, as we wondered whether to shake hands.
He cleared his throat, ‘You look well.’
‘So well you didn’t recognise me,’ I said drily, wondering whose voice this was. Not mine.
He gestured towards Waverley steps. We carved two separate paths through the people descending from Princes Street.
The North British Hotel was next door to the station. Gilt-framed crags and stags, Edwardian mahogany, black Vitrolite from the twenties. Notices in copperplate script regretfully informing patrons of this or that decline from their exalted pre-war standards.
‘We can get a cup of tea here,’ he said.
God, I needed a drink. How had I spent so many years of my life with a teetotaller?
Without his hat and coat he looked younger than sixty-nine. The heaviness I’d found so ageing when we were married had stopped the clock. His head was solid as wet clay. A faint craquelure around the eyes, but his brow and cheeks and jaw still plumply taut. Meeting him for the first time, you might have taken him for a sensualist. Until he looked at you. Who was feeding him these days? Had he found a companion to share his retirement, a wife-in-waiting to trim the hairs in his nose and listen to the radio with him at night? And later, did she warm his bed? Good luck to her. Beefy was fifty-two. The future Mrs Coubrough had the better bargain.
‘I’d like a sherry,’ I told the waitress.
His mouth formed a disapproving line, though choosing sherry was a concession to his feelings.
‘Actually, no,’ I said, ‘a gin, please.’
Which, when it came, was even weaker than the ones they served in Glasgow. Still, at least they’d found some proper tonic water. The taste of quinine reminded me of all the malaria cases I’d treated in Africa. He listened with that look I used to dread.
‘I thought you might manage a professional interest,’ I said, surprising him. And myself. I’d rarely taken this satiric tone when we lived together.
After a few empty seconds I refused to fill, he told me he’d retired in thirty-four. When war broke out the Emergency Medical Service had got in touch. They were recruiting a team of volunteers to deal with outbreaks of neurosis in the civilian population: panic during air raids, rumour-spreading, hoarding food, anything that could undermine the war effort.
‘And has there been much of this neurosis?’
We both knew the answer to this.
‘Not as much as was feared,’ he said.
Outside, dusk was falling. Two waitresses circled the room, lowering the blackout blinds, until we were sitting in complete darkness. A brittle click and we were revealed again. That same yellow light you found in hotels the world over.
Weak as it was, the gin did its work. I shrugged off my fur, warmed all the way through. Across the lounge, a grey-haired man caught my eye. Just for a moment. I might have been fifty-three but I’d kept my waist, and my skin had retained enough sun to mark me out from the peeliewallie locals. There was a young woman with him, swollen belly straining against the crepe of her dress, one of the unlucky few whose suffering didn’t pass with the first trimester.
Hugh watched me watching them, his hawk’s eyes burning into my cheek.
‘Who is he, this man you want to marry?’
He had never been one for small talk.
‘A Scotsman,’ I said, ‘a structural engineer. Nearer to me in age. And in other things.’
‘He knows you already have a husband?’
‘We’ve no secrets from each other.’
‘Then he’s a scoundrel.’
I raised my eyebrows, took another sip of gin, ‘A scoundrel who loves me—’
He released one of his old disparaging breaths.
‘—as you never did.’
Colour flooded his face. He checked the nuns at the next table, who hadn’t heard. And what if they had?
Studying that beetroot flush, I wondered about his blood pressure, his risk of apoplexy or heart seizure. Many a heavy old man went that way. A moment later I was stricken by the thought, by the words old man.
In the street outside, the air raid siren wailed.
I’d come back in June. Queues outside the butcher’s, sandbags everywhere, but no trace of the enemy. Doubtless there’d been panic, back in forty-one, but by now nobody rushed. The waitress continued loading dirty crockery onto her tray and carried it calmly out to the kitchen.
The hotel manager walked in, urging us to our feet. We would be supplied with fresh pots of tea after the all-clear. Hugh collected his coat and hat. I took my time, finished my gin.
In the lobby there was a scrum. Chambermaids, porters, kitchen skivvies, travellers too smart for the station buffet, guests flushed from the bedrooms, grandmothers and great aunts giving white-kneed schoolboys a mid-term treat: all of us trying to get down the stairs to the cellars. The manager asked for patience, the taking of turns from left and right. No one listened. Hugh and
I loitered at the back.
‘I’ll not divorce you,’ he said in my ear, making me start. The old dogmatic Hugh, though I recalled these diktats being delivered at arm’s length. Now the words were flavoured with his tobacco breath. His baritone voice vibrated in my skin.
Someone stepped on a nun’s foot. Tempers were rising. Grumbling turned to accusation. Clumsiness, bad manners, pushing-in. Hugh tipped his head towards the room we had just left.
Back to our table in the empty lounge, amid the half-drunk teacups and crumb-strewn plates. I’ll not divorce you. It wasn’t as if the stigma could hurt his career. Besides, I was the adulterous party, the shame was all mine. Why would he refuse?
He lifted a corner of the blackout blind, peering up into the sky. I pictured a fleet of Messerschmitts following the line of Princes Street towards the clock tower directly above us.
‘If we couldn’t live together, we can still die together,’ I said.
And then it came to me: the provenance of this ironic drawl of mine.
He dropped the blind. ‘No one’s going to die.’
‘It was a joke.’ In my new Arabella voice, I added, ‘There weren’t too many of those when we were married.’
‘We are still married.’
Something in his tone. Looking up to meet his eye, I felt a flutter in my chest. What a fool I was, my vanity would feed on anything. Beefy wasn’t the first. Hospital colleagues, embassy staff, a fellow who’d deflected my questions with vague talk of ‘import-export’. We’d drive out to the Pyramids, the temple at Dakor, the Wli falls. A late dinner, a moonlit walk. The heady moment when our laughter stopped. That sweet languor, my blood slowing with the miraculous certainty: I was wanted.